Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 12:30:59 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: Re-unions vs class struggle


Ken Wrote:

>(I don't know what text editor you use, but your posts are oddly formatted,
>which makes for a tough read.)
>
>Your Subject line -- "unions vs. the class struggle" -- suggests, to me,

<snip>

I basically agree with what Ken says here. However my question to Neil is 
basically why are you writing off the unions? I just can,t understand how 
the pro-capitalists tops and the base are put in one big bathtub by you. Its 
like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Can,t you see that there is a 
difference?

I thought that communists tried to fight in order to lead the unions. To get 
the membership to fight in their own interests against the traitors at the 
top. In a sense you have the same position as the PCP maoists. They have 
written of the industrial proletariat for the "masses" in the third world. 
You write off the trade unions where the industrial proletariat at present 
is led by its pro capitalist leaders.

Another thing that confuses me is the line on state capitalism. It could 
only be a theroy dreamed up by a radical petty bougeois intellectual, raised 
in a country with a treacherous social democratic leadership over a long 
period of time. A tired leftist who instead of fighting for the leadership 
of the working class on a communist program declares that everybody in the 
reformist parties of the workers movements are state capitalists.

Then after declaring this puts all of the workers in the same bag. And then 
has the audacity to say we should stand on the outside and scream that we 
are the real communists. For me communists fight anywhere and everywhere for 
a program. Inside and outside the unions. We do not dream up theories to 
stand aside and let the reformists have and open field! That is rediculous 
and probably what Lenin would have called a "ultra left sickness" of some 
sort. But in fact is pett bougeoisie right wing ignorance of leading the 
working class towards a communist revolution.
If Lenin had the same reasoning as you he would have said that Bolsheviks do 
not go to the front and the army because the army was "imperialist monarchy" 
or something.  

In fact what really happened is that the bureacrats in the reformist parties 
have gone over more or more to the side of the bourgeoisie. In the western 
industrial countries their aren,t any state capitalists, just bouegois 
states, the reformists sometimes think they steer. However today we can see 
as interimperialist rivalry grows and the deformed workers states are 
disintegrating a shift in the reformist leadership of being mediators for 
the bourgeois state through its institutions, now openly going over to the 
side of the bourgiosie. 

In fact perhaps the tasks of the communists become easier because the 
reformist can no longer play both sides of the fence. It is either the 
bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The real danger for revolutionaries are the 
traditionalists and fake leftists who are still trying to reform the 
bourgeois state by building mini programs around programs of back to the 
good old times. Communist should be telling the truth to the workers. Either 
we fight for a communist future through the dictatorship of the proletariat 
or we lose! 

Warm Regards 
malecki

PS: Ken, i do not thing these guys are cops! Just petty bourgeois left 
radicals in the service of the bougeoisie...Because anybody that is 
basically ready to give up the struggle for leadership of the unions to the 
reformist traitors by screaming state capitalism if they are honest should 
get on the same plane to Peru as Aldolfo...



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